Mr. Pádraig Dalton:

We have a pre-release access policy, which is on our website. Pre-release access is allowed under the European statistics code of practice but it is only allowed in a restricted number of cases. For the national income and expenditure release, there are two named individuals who get pre-release access, one from the Department of Finance and one from the Central Bank. They get the access at 8.30 a.m. on the morning of the release.

With regard to the rationale, if we go back to the core values of official statistics, and I am sure the Deputy is familiar with this, it is really important that when the CSO publishes statistics, the public trusts that what it is getting is an independent and objective assessment of the information. Anything that might undermine that perception would potentially risk that trust. The CSO, like all other national statistics institutes, applies the European code of practice on pre-release access. The direction of travel at a European level is to actually eliminate pre-release access, but it has not gone there now. The most important thing is that there is transparency in who has access and when. The CSO has a register of pre-release access publicly available on its website and it includes the names of the individuals who have pre-release access for those releases, where pre-release access is provided.